Negotiating curricular censorship: A frame analysis of two cases in Catholic schools

Abstract

In today’s educational landscape, where censorship is increasingly being used to control and homogenize ideologies, it’s crucial to examine how censorship policies are being framed and subsequently negotiated. This paper uses frame analysis to analyze two instances of book censorship in Catholic schools, exploring how insiders (e.g., administrators, students, families, alumni) and outsiders (e.g., news outlets, general public) attempted to establish their frame’s relevancy as they responded to the removal of a particular text. The analysis reveals that educational leaders face challenges in reconciling institutional expectations with local community values, but ultimately, in these cases, it was the voices of community insiders that shaped the discourse surrounding the policy and its outcomes. Through this analysis, the paper contributes a nuanced understanding of censorship in educational settings, challenging the assumption that private religious schools are inherently sites of censorship, and emphasizing the value of community perspectives in efforts to understand censorship.